Your ultimate wild December
Just how many species is it possible to spot in the depths of winter?
It’s nearly December. The madness of Christmas is upon us, the light is hardly light at all, and the days are becoming apologetically short. The countryside seems to sleep under frost or gloom. Many nature lovers resign themselves dolefully to the indoors, assuming that there isn’t much to see, other than reindeer, holly and mistletoe (and robins wearing hats).
A year or two back, I felt the December doldrums approaching as usual, but then a thought struck me: is this month really so bad for wildlife watching, other than the odd starling roost? Is there anything that is at its best in the last month of the year? Is everything sleeping, hiding or laying low, or is it just wildlife watchers who do this?
Are there hidden riches in December, ones that we might not expect? What about rockpooling, for example? What might be hiding in fresh water? And how about fungi and mosses? There are always birds about, but what about mammals?
After some quick research and a few begging emails and calls (it was late November) I decided to juggle the upcoming craziness of December with a wildlife challenge, based in my home county of Dorset. I would try to look for as many types of birds, flowers, lichens, insects and so on, as I could, aided by as many experts as could
spare the time at short notice. To take what would hopefully be a realistic target, I would aim for 500 species.
An early start
The first day of December dawned cold, dull and damp, as only this month can. I opened the curtains and duly recorded a silver birch, pedunculate oak and ivy in the garden; a crow flew over and a grey squirrel chattered in irritated fashion. Naturally, a robin hopped across the lawn. Three plants, two birds and a mammal – the challenge was underway. Just 494 ‘things’ to go.
I kicked off with a morning of rockpooling at Kimmeridge Bay, on the Jurassic Coast. My contact was Steve Trewhella – an author and expert in marine and shoreline plants and animals – a man who makes a rockpool sound as thrilling as a jungle. The day was so sepulchral grey that the sky and sea seemed to meld into each other, and the waves lapped disinterestedly over the shoreline boulders. The pools, though, shimmered with life.
“This is a flat periwinkle,” proclaimed Steve, sounding as though he was making a coffee order, pointing at a collection of small ovoid shells – some the colour of earwax, others pink, all adhering to the rocks. The pools produced a satisfying surge of mollusc sightings – rough periwinkle, grey top shell, limpets, common periwinkles, a delightfully spiralled dog whelk and some smart, conical Cingula trifasciata, which looked like tiny ice-cream cones – vanilla with orange stripes. We saw several seaweeds, too.
The jewels in the rockpool were the sea anemones, small but menacing, each a tentacular death ray. There were red beadlet anemones, deadly snakelocks anemone pretending to be a gentle seaweed, and gem anemone (say that after a Christmas cocktail), which just looks like an alien invented by a movie producer.
A couple of hours in Steve’s company was more than enough to prove that the seashore is alive and kicking in the midst of December. It simply isn’t the season that most people head outdoors to look. I ended the first of the month with more than 80 species in the bank.
A week later found me back at the seaside, but this time on the slopes above the Jurassic Coast, on the chalk downland and woodland of Durlston Country Park, near Swanage. Today’s enthusiasts were members of the British Bryological Society, and we were looking for mosses and liverworts. I soon discovered, though, that bryologists are never purely bryologists – everybody was interested in everything, from lichens to birds to beetles. The mosses formed the soft underbelly of universal fascination.
Ideal conditions
Britain, it turns out, is something of a bryophytic nirvana, with internationally important moss communities and almost a tenth of the world’s species. Our damp climate is a boon, because mosses need a film of water for reproduction. They thrive in the damp
The gem anemone just looks like an alien invented by a movie producer.
conditions of December – their sweet spot. We quickly found 30 species.
On the same trip, our enthusiasts identified several species of lichens. These are symbiotic associations between fungi and either algae or cyanobacteria, and they grow everywhere from tree trunks to stone walls – there are often exciting species on gravestones ( see p18). Lichens look the same year-round, and Britain is once again a lichenologist’s dream. Apparently, a top-class operative can nab you about 500 species in a single day.
I couldn’t find a lichenologist with free time but, the day after the moss quest, I found myself on a fungi foray in the New Forest, with the exceptional mycologist Malcolm Storey as my guide. Mycologists and bryologists are both all-rounders in the biological sciences cricket team, so he was as delighted as I was to flush a woodcock from the fungi-rich undergrowth as we searched, while bramblings flew helpfully overhead. (As an experienced birder, I had already notched up 70 species or so.) One of the first fungi we found was almost a bird, a mass of turkey tail covering a tree stump. This bracket fungus is named after the coloured concentric bands across it, which fancifully resemble the tail of a turkey.
December is well beyond the peak autumnal time for fungi, but Malcolm assured me that a whole day’s searching can yield 100 or more species. In one of the prime spots in Britain, in the light rain, the soil smelling heavy and mulchy, we easily managed 32 in just a morning. We found a glistening inkcap, an artist’s bracket and a snapping bonnet, which wouldn’t sound out of place in a studio, plus a wrinkled crust, a butter cap and a bitter oysterling. One innocent-looking fungus, a petite mushroom with an orange cap, turned out to be a funeral bell. It was exciting to peer closely at something packed with enough toxins to kill you.
Net profit
Having survived my brush with death, and now armed with a list of about 300 ‘things,’ my next assignment was freshwater ecology or, to give it a less glamorous title, ponddipping. My guide was ecological consultant Robert Aquilina and his chosen location was some floodlands along the River Avon. His impressive net was soon at work in the sluggish ditches and riverbanks.
It seemed weird to add a damselfly to my December tally, and still more so a mayfly. Yet here they were in their work clothes – the mayfly like an aquatic earwig with three tails, and a banded demoiselle a little chunkier, but with well concealed killer jaws and
sharp claws. Both were like frogs waiting for a princess to kiss them in a few months’ time. It was hard to imagine the slim, leggy creature writhing in the net becoming a dancing damselfly, bouncing in the summer breeze like a slow-motion hummingbird. As for Ephemera danica, its mating frenzies over the shimmering waters are proverbially brief, yet its existence is far from ephemeral underwater – lasting for two years.
Our pond-dipping proved productive. A leech called Erpobdella testacea was a good find, adding to my far-from-burgeoning annelid list, while bugs scored well – with the predatory trio of backswimmer, common water boatman and lesser water boatman. We found freshwater shrimps and a water hoglouse (an isopod, like a woodlouse.) Robert pointed out a wide range of aquatic plants and, for the first time this month, we encountered several fish. In the winter, many fish retreat to deeper waters and are quite inactive, so it was generally a case of finding tiddlers – the three-spined stickleback, bullhead and minnow.
Towards the end of the trip, Robert peered at the bottom of his net and frowned. “A freshwater mussel, but which one is this?” he said. We had already clocked half a dozen snails. After some deliberation and puzzlement, he took some photos and shrugged. A month or two later, it was confirmed as a swamp orb mussel ( Sphaerium nucleus), a rarity found only at a handful of sites in the UK. It is amazing what you can discover during a December pond dip.
Going on a plant hunt
By now I was close to my goal, and I had a feeling that a botanical blitz would get me over the 500 line. It was only 17 December. I met up with two of the most talented botanistcum-writers in Britain, Bob Gibbons and Peter Marren, on a warm, gentle morning with pretensions of sunshine. The only previous occasion I had botanised with Peter, he had spent considerable time quoting Shakespeare, so I knew it would be entertaining.
Sure enough, a whistle-stop tour through the Purbeck heartlands made the botany soar. One of the many talents of experienced plant enthusiasts is to forsake those tacky ornaments known as flowers, and use the vegetative parts instead. Every metre of turf examined yielded something new, a Devil’s-bit scabious here, a pale butterwort there. They are magicians, these readers of leaves, berries and nuts, faded stems and vegetative scrap. Somehow, Bob and Peter eked out grasses and sedges in droves, using arcane clues and years of experience. On the Purbeck moors, we encountered all three species of sundews, a bladderwort and the odd pondweed.
Some plants, of course, were in flower. December holds greater riches than you could possibly expect. The Botanical Society of the British Isles holds the New Year Plant Hunt on the last three days of December every year and has encountered over 600 species in bloom in the wild state.
Our winter’s tale was over by lunch – an oak marble gall was the last catch of the day, number 522 of the month. “What are you going to do now?” asked Bob. “Enjoy Christmas,” I replied.
I did, too. In the following days, I added dribs and drabs, the odd spider (there are eight species you can get indoors), several moths plus a sika deer and a field vole. As the light faded on 31 December, the last thing I saw was an otter on the weir at Blandford Forum. For the first time ever, I was sorry that the month was over.
It was confirmed as a swamp orb mussel, a rarity found at a handful of sites in the UK.